[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

I heard through a person from FIRST that it is the fault of a couple of people who feel like they should keep it under wraps for fear that it will get out into the FIRST community. It is annoying, especially for teams because FIRST already has the ones they need, but we are left hanging with out of stock suppliers scratching their heads waiting for someone to pop out and say, "January fool"!

Oh well, at least it is an item available to most every team, just not an exact copy.

Originally Posted by TD912

Depends on how early they would let them know. The more people FIRST tells about their game, the more likely details would leak out to the general public early.

Originally Posted by jamie_1930

My suggestion would be to make sure you can quickly adapt your robot to match different balls. For instance have all your programming variables organized so that when you get to competition you can go to the practice field and change your variables (if any matter to the trajectory of the ball) to best suit the game balls from DTI. It would be good practice, if you choose to do this, to have team members bring in their own soccer balls from home and have the programmers practice adapting to different balls based, to speed up the proccess at competition.

Guys, I'm right there with you in agreement with FIRST keeping their games under wraps. They absolutely need to take into account the secrecy of the game. That being said, I feel this is an issue that can be handled rather simply when communicating with a company. It is a large commitment (think about the amount of FRC teams that need soccer balls now). Why should I have to design my robot to work with a bunch of different balls when I know exactly which one will be used in competition? It seems to me like this is a problem that can be handled better.